Silly things that I feel vaguely guilty about, Part V

Okay. So when I was in sixth grade, on the first day of Latin class, I met this girl. And she introduced herself, hi, I'm Mary Ellen, and we exchanged phone numbers for homework reasons, and I wrote down Mary Ellen A. and then her phone number, right? And I have small handwriting, so it looked like I had written MaryEllen as all one word, but of course I hadn't. She said "Oh my God! You spelled my name right! Nobody ever spells my name right!" and because I thought that it was two words I said "Well, yeah. I mean how else would you spell it?"

And seriously. How else would you spell it?

But it turned out she spelled it MaryEllen, with no space, and by the time she had explained this to me, I felt too embarrassed to admit that I had not, in fact, spelled her name right, and I didn't want to say that that was an insane spelling, so I just didn't say anything. Oh my God, how it has haunted me since then. Every time I thought about MaryEllen - which, okay, wasn't all that often - I was just eaten up with dismay and I have always desperately wanted to explain to someone that OF COURSE I didn't spell her insane name right the first time, HOW COULD I WHEN IT IS AN INSANE SPELLING OF A NAME THAT IS TWO NAMES?

I thought of this today because I was covering my books with contact paper, a habit I picked up in sixth grade, and it reminded me of middle school, and then of MaryEllen. Recently (within the last month or two), Bonnie mentioned MaryEllen and said "Remember in Latin class? How you spelled her name right? And then you were all How else would you spell it? GOD you were such a prissy little bitch."

I have never been so grateful for being called a prissy little bitch. I was all NO YOU HAVE MISUNDERSTOOD THAT WHOLE INTERACTION. LET ME EXPLAIN WHAT REALLY HAPPENED.

...Justification was mine on that day. I thought of that today. I am now no longer eaten alive with dismay and guilt, but I have vague guilt feelings left over, and part of me wants to call MaryEllen, wherever she is, and explain that no, I didn't spell her name right in Dr. F.'s class on that day, because nobody could spell her name right after only hearing her say it, and the reason that we didn't stay friends in high school (apart from having nothing in common) was essentially that our relationship was based from the beginning on a rotting foundation of lies and deception.

All loud and screamy

I went to my very first ever LSU football game last night. It was a lot of fun. Trindon Holliday ran extremely quickly, and everyone shouted very loud. And it was only a little game!

Having attended this game, I've begun to feel that Joss Whedon really missed an excellent opportunity to have Anya go to a sporting event. I think it would have been very, very funny to have Anya go to a sporting event. J.K. Rowling didn't miss the point of having weird people at sporting events, which is why it is so very excellent when Luna commentates for Quidditch.

Hey, and speaking of Sarah Palin

Carol Fowler, who is a Democrat from South Carolina, said that Sarah Palin's main qualification for the veep job was that she hadn't had an abortion.

Ouch.

This dream I had about Amber Benson

I was reading Sunshine before bed last night, and I noticed that one of the reviews on the back was a quote from Amber Benson, which I wouldn’t have noticed previously because, of course, I didn’t know who Amber Benson was. (I still think that’s a little strange – does being in a vampire show make you blurb girl for a vampire book?) But then I fell asleep and had a dream about Amber Benson. It was a really strange dream. She was inexplicably in my living room, and I was like, “Amber Benson! Hi! I’m so excited to see you!” (and I really, really was, like we had been best friends in elementary school and I’d just lost track of her). And then she said, “Hey, we need to go witness the Dark Lord’s rise, okay?” and since I remembered what happens in that scene – their wands connect, and Harry escapes heroically! and apart from Cedric Diggory’s death and the post-traumatic stress for Harry, everything works out fine! – I agreed to go with her. They were having it in one of the houses way down at the other end of my street. But halfway down there I remembered that Voldemort had been replaced at the end by a lady Dark Lord, and I didn’t know how that was going to go, so I said, “You know what, Amber Benson? You go on and I’ll just see you back at the house.” And on my way back home a bunch of Tolkien dwarves hopped out of a tree and gave me some sandwich cookies – which leads me to believe I may have gotten them confused with Keebler elves.

I think my subconscious is having some issues about sorting out fictional universes. Also, I think the lady Dark Lord might have been Sarah Palin – I didn’t get close enough to see her well, but she looked like Tina Fey, and I know that Tina Fey represents Sarah Palin to my brain (because my aunt said that Tina Fey would spoof Sarah Palin really well).

Then after that, I dreamed that God was knocking very hard on my door and I was so, so sleepy, but I finally managed to drag myself out of bed to go answer it, and I was running quickly downstairs all grumbly and rehearsing under my breath how I was going to yank open the door and say, “Okay then, GOD. You have woken me UP. WHAT was so damn IMPORTANT it couldn’t WAIT until the MORNING?” But I woke up before I answered the door. (Which is too bad, because the last time I dreamed I met God, we were total BFF.)

Thanks, subconscious. Despite the incredible subtlety of this message, I have managed at last to decipher your meaning. I still don’t know what you were talking about with Amber Benson and the Keebler dwarves.

Whoa

Huh. Who knew? It is an muggy nasty day following a hurricane that knocked down my aunts’ entire house, while another hurricane (bad Ike! Go the hell away!) comes zooming towards us, and I just did something insane and impractical that made no sense and left me in an unpleasant place, monetarily speaking, and I am so happy that I keep bursting into song and squeaking with joy. And not flood and Judgment Day and mine disaster songs, either – funny songs, Gilbert & Sullivan songs, the cheerful fast-paced church songs.

Which is consolations. Which means I did the exactly right thing.

Yeah, so today, I dropped out of school. I dropped out. Of school. I’m a drop-out now. An unemployed, uninsured dropout, that’s me. Part of my brain is screaming WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU LUNATIC GIRL YOU WILL NOW DIE OF SOME UNSPECIFIED DISEASE AND BECOME A BURDEN ON THE TAXPAYERS, because this is so not me. I’m good at school; school is my thing. I get straight As and research things thoroughly and use library resources. I’m the girl who does things because they make practical sense.

That, I think, is the reason I quit school. At least, those were the terms in which I framed my internal debate in order to make dropping out into a less insane decision. I thought this thought: I’ve spent my entire life choosing to do the sensible, practical thing, rather than the thing that I think will make me the most happy (which isn’t to say I don’t do things that make me happy, because I do of course). And that’s worked out fine – I saved money, I went to England, I got good jobs that developed useful skills – so that’s what I’ve always done. But now the system is breaking down, because I have spent the few weeks of this semester consumed with dread and unhappiness, so I decided to do a new thing. I decided to do something that was not practical, just because it’s what I want, and see where that goes.

Though this is all rationalization after the fact. The real truth is that listening to music when you are trying to settle your mind can be a terrible, terrible idea (Mumsy, look. Here is an example of what I mean about taking music as omens). When you are trying to settle your mind about something, you are all too apt to hear a song and think THAT SONG IS SPEAKING TO MY SOUL when actually it’s – you know – it’s just a song. Not signs and portents. Just a regular old song. It’s dangerous because any song could come on! The song that says “You have to be able to get a job with earning potential and it is insane to abandon your health insurance without any prospect of health insurance from elsewhere” could come on, or – and this is what actually happened – the song could come on that says “trust your instincts, close your eyes, and leap”. I was in the car on the way to work, listening to my mp3 player, and Idina Menzel sang most stirringly about the trusting and the closing and the leaping, and I was like YES. THIS IS MY PATH.

Of course, Idina Menzel’s character in Wicked ended up having to fake her own death in order to escape from the oppressive regime of misery. But whatever. SHE IS SPEAKING TO MY SOUL.

One of the dorkiest things about myself I have ever confessed

I really like reading articles about books I have just discovered. Whenever I discover a new book that I like a lot, if I have any reason to believe that people would have written articles about it, I log on to the MLA International Bibliography and run searches for it. I've done this for ages. I read a zillion articles on Angels in America, I remember quite specifically.

It was very trying not to have any power. My sustaining-myself-through-the-hurricane book, which is very long and I haven't finished it yet, is shaping up to be a much more raving success than, actually, I had anticipated, and there are a bunch of articles about it on The Internet. Only six with linked full text on MLA, but whatever, I can find more, I haven't even looked at JSTOR and Project Muse yet! But anyway, while the power was out, I really wanted to read such articles AND I COULD NOT.

...I will never be cool. I read scholarly articles on purpose for fun.

I did discover that Salman Rushdie, alas, doesn't like Paul Scott. He dislikes him so much he used the phrase "big brown cocks" in his critique - I swear to God, he did. But I hope Salman Rushdie is oversimplifying, because I am really enjoying the way Paul Scott writes, all loopy and swirly, and I don't want to have to hate him for being a racist and a paternalist and using a lame and overdone thing to evoke the Indians-are-scary vibe. We'll see.

Edit to add: I finished my book. I still think Salman Rushdie was oversimplifying, and I still like the loopy swirly way that Paul Scott writes, and we will see what happens with the second book, which has "scorpion" in the title (not as nice!). But I can see Salman Rushdie's point - in the end it was more classist than racist though, I'm sorry to report, classism with racism all mixed in. Not flagrantly, and I know I'm always very, very displeased when somebody gets raped in a book, so I may have been cranky, but I think there was a definite undertone of, you know, educated Indians are Good Indians and peasant Indians are Bad Indians. Not very nice. I wish I hadn't liked it so much up until rubbish Daphne's rubbish letter to her rubbish aunt, because I feel rather let-down now. I want to write Paul Scott a letter and ask him why he wasn't free of prejudice so that I could love him with an uncomplicated love like I do Atticus Finch.

I killed a lovebug today, only because it was in my room.

People aren't meant to be without electricity.

It does things to you.

Oh my God, FINALLY

I cannot believe this has finally happened. When I noticed, I actually didn't believe it, and I spent several minutes running up and down the stairs of my apartment to verify that this had indeed happened.

See, because a lot of times a stairwell in a house or apartment will be lit. You'll have one light, often at the top of the stairs, but there will be a light switch at the bottom and a light switch at the top so that you can have the light when going up or down and then switch it right off when you reach your destination. But the light switches are always set up in such a way that you can never have both light switches off and have the light off. You could have both light switches on and the light on, but never both off and the light off.

This has been bugging me for years. I mean years. I never see this set-up without being deeply annoyed by it. Because the light switches and the light can match, right? But they can only match while the light is in play. During its rest time, i.e., the way it is most of the time, one of the light switches is out of sync with the status of the light. It. Drives. Me. Crazy.

But today, I had to run downstairs to get a film, and I switched the staircase light on at the top of the stairs - I switched the switch on (up). I got to the bottom of the stairs and turned the switch to the up position which turned off the staircase light (at this point both switches were at up and the light was off). I fetched my movie and went back to the staircase and switched the downstairs switch to the down position, which turned on the staircase light, and I had made it halfway up the stairs before the full significance of this dawned on me.

I had just set the downstairs switch to the off position. When I came downstairs first, I had turned the upstairs switch to the on position. This meant that when I got upstairs and turned the upstairs switch to the off position, BOTH SWITCHES WOULD BE AT OFF AND THE LIGHTS WOULD BE OFF.

THEY MATCH.

THEY MATCH THEY MATCH THEY MATCH THEY MATCH.

I was so happy. I felt like The Gods were sending me a sign that this apartment is indeed the right apartment from me (as if I didn't know). I felt this so strongly that I would have built a fire and offered up an animal sacrifice right there if I hadn't gotten distracted by the monster of uncertainty and had to run downstairs and upstairs and downstairs and upstairs to check that I wasn't imagining it.

What bothers me is that I view lights (and light switches) as being in play or out of play. If a light's on, it's in play, it's like doing battle, it's not rest time for the light, you know? And if a switch is flipped to the ON position, it's in play. Not resting. Stressed and unhappy. In most houses, the staircase switches never get a rest. One of them is constantly in play unless the light is on. In my house, there is peace at the switches when there is peace at the light. It's holistic staircase rest, peace, and happiness.

This is such a crazy post I almost didn't post it. But I have to. Because you just have no idea how long this has been an issue for me, and I always wondered why the light switch people did it that way, when the other way (my apartment's way) was clearly better and more unified.

Life is weird

A few years ago, I sneered at Anna for purchasing seven seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer because even though they were only $20 altogether, I didn’t feel it was a necessary investment when she could have spent that $20 on something more exciting like, I don’t know, a whole bunch of dental floss.

The other day I found myself gravely talking to Robyn about how we didn’t think Buffy ever recovered emotionally from Angel’s departure, and how we really felt that her subsequent romantic dysfunction could be attributed to an unwillingness to let go of her relationship with him.

You know what totally fascinates me?

When I have Band-Aids on my fingers and I wash my hands and then there’s water under the Band-Aid and I press down on it and water squeezes out through the pores in the Band-Aid. There’s no reason this should fascinate me but it really, really, really does.

Oh, and on a totally unrelated note, I learned today that in 2005/2006, there were 608 black male students in Wyoming high schools. Six hundred and eight. Total. That’s all there were. In Louisiana that same year, there were a hundred and forty seven thousand. We have 242 times as many black male students as Wyoming has. Think about that.

Oh, oh, and you know what else, too? Apparently my university is considering establishing a farmers’ market on campus. I am all about that. I would go to the farmers’ market! I would be on it like white on fresh homegrown organic rice. I would fling myself at a farmers’ market and marry it and have its babies. I could cook with real vegetables then! And I would be motivated to buy vegetables, too, because it is virtuous to shop at farmers’ markets and there would be fruit and fresh vegetables right there, and I could like buy strawberries on the way to class. Strawberries! And raspberries, and oh, if God loves me, maybe also those delicious teacakes I used to get at the downtown farmer’s market that were so incredibly delicious.